


An Extraordinary Girl

by Misdemeanor1331



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, Horror, Memory Loss, Other, Prison, Psychological Horror, Solitary Confinement, Starvation, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27200309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misdemeanor1331/pseuds/Misdemeanor1331
Summary: Held prisoner in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, Hermione Granger wakes one day in the center of a hedge maze. She thinks it might be an opportunity to escape, but quickly learns that the labyrinth takes more than it gives.
Relationships: n/a
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14
Collections: Harry Potter ABCs of Death: A Halloween Fest





	An Extraordinary Girl

**Author's Note:**

> No beta on this one, so all mistakes are my own. Thanks to Artemisia for hosting this fest. I love writing horror, and this was a great way to stretch those muscles! 
> 
> My prompt for this fest was **labyrinth**. As an additional warning, I experimented with the style of this piece, modeling it off of the “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski. The book was a trip to read. I found it to be a gripping, confusing, and extraordinary piece of writing. And though it has its faults, one thing I thought it did well was show the characters’ growing descent into psychosis. I wanted to play with that same sort of style here. With that being said: strap in. Let’s get weird.

**An Extraordinary Girl**

For much of her youth, Hermione Granger thought she would meet death at the end of a wand. A girl of seventeen shouldn’t have given much thought to the cause and manner of her own demise, but Hermione was no ordinary girl.

She was extraordinary, and had been told as much since childhood.

Hermione had made famous friends in a world that, until age eleven, she hadn’t known existed. She’d fought in battles with far-reaching consequences that tore apart families and changed the course of history. And through the monumental pressure brought on by this reality, she was expected to function normally.

An impossible task.

She’d learned that much in third year, when she’d spent the weeks walking backwards through time, flinching at every question and driven to something near madness by her own ambition. Despite her exhaustion, she had stopped sleeping about halfway through the year. An hour or two per night at most, the rest of the dark hours spent staring at her bed hangings, mind tripping over what might come next. The endless possibilities of an infinite future. Some would have called it insomnia. However, Hermione had never been officially diagnosed, and she valued nothing so much as accuracy.

When Hermione relinquished the Time Turner, she’d expected the return of sleep. It was a fair bargain, after all: the ability to traipse through time in exchange for the ability to lose it. But the year had broken her, planted an anxious seed in her mind that only sprouted when the candles guttered out and her dormitory filled with soft, even breathing.

Sleep aids did not interest her. Meditation felt too close to Divination, a subject she could not abide. There was little other option than to fall into old habits and imagine her death.

It was an ersatz game of Clue in which she was both investigator and victim, the scenarios accumulating like beloved books over years of collecting. Lord Voldemort in the Great Hall with a Killing Curse. Antonin Dolohov in the courtyard with a Severing Hex. Fenrir Greyback in the Dark Forest with his teeth.

Bellatrix Lestrange in Malfoy Manor’s study with a silver knife.

Though her collection was broad, Hermione had never actually imagined that scenario. What could ever bring her to Malfoy Manor? Why would Bellatrix ever bother with a tool as plebeian as a knife? It felt improbable

_Extraordinary…_

and yet it had brought her closest.

But not all the way.

Instead, like an inaccurate Floo address, it had dropped her off in the manor’s dungeons. Her cell was a six-by-six-by-immeasurable column of darkness, cold, and isolation. The stone floor was strewn with musty hay. In the far left corner was a bucket (self-emptying, a small mercy) for her waste. There were no windows, no avenue for fresh air save the parchment-thin seams around the thick, wooden door and the irons bars slotted through its top, easily two feet above her head.

Hermione whispered at first, testing the silence, searching for connection in the dark.

Were Harry and Ron here, too? Enclosed in cells, as scared and alone as she was? Or were they free? Perhaps they had escaped and were even now planning an assault against the manor to save her. Hermione was realistic: no one but Harry was irreplaceable. But they might come for her.

They _might_.

Eventually, her whispers turned to speech, her volume normal even if her pace was frantic. As hours passed with no response, her desperation grew. Fear eroded her control, and her babbling turned to screams. Hermione shouted and cursed until she grew hoarse, demanding, pleading.

 _Praying_.

And for the next few days, she regretted every useless moment of it. Her effort had resulted in nothing but a sore throat. She was locked in the dark with no food, no water, and no answers.

* * *

Hermione woke in the center of a hedge maze. It was night, and a strange sky stretched above her. There was no moon, no stars, and no clouds. Just a flat, navy expanse that disappeared beyond the maze walls.

She sat up, pressing her palms against the cool grass. She curled her fingers into it. The texture felt right, but the pull was wrong. It sloughed from the ground like old feathers, coming away without resistance or proof of roots. Unsettling, but at least it was soft on her bare feet.

A fact that gave her uneasy comfort: who had removed her shoes?

She stood on unsteady legs and turned a slow circle. Paths branched out in four directions, cutting the maze into quadrants. Without the stars, it was impossible to know which direction she faced.

“Harry? Ron?” Her voice echoed. Strange, again. The hedges would have absorbed the sound, not bounced it back. She yelled again, louder, and waited for a reply.

Nothing.

Her skin prickled; this felt like a trap. Voldemort had used a hedge maze to his advantage once before and to great effect. She was already at its center. Maybe the periphery was where the danger lay.

Or maybe this was an opportunity. She was a rat in this maze, clearly, but rats who ran successfully usually earned a reward at the end.

She had to try.

The paths looked identical. She approached the nine o’clock track and inspected the hedge. It was about two feet wide, ten feet tall, and composed of a snarled plant she didn’t recognize. Thorns an inch long jutted from the branches. Her brow furrowed as she bent closer, using her little finger to measure the space between the protrusions. They were evenly spaced, with little to no variation.

Hermione backed away from the hedge and looked around her again. There was no randomness here: no smattering of stars or unevenly trimmed grasses, no broken thorns or varying breeze. The temperature was unremarkable, neither hot nor cold, and she heard none of the noises normally associated with an English evening.

She’d never seen such perfection in the natural world. Which meant that this one _wasn’t_.

Steadying herself, Hermione carefully stripped a handful of leaves and piled them at the head of a random path to mark her way. She headed into the maze at a slow jog.

_How?_

Hermione stopped and looked down at fresh denims and a pristine jumper. Her skin was clean, and when she pressed a hand into her hair, her curls bounced back with their usual spring. Hunger didn’t gnaw at her stomach. Her throat didn’t ache from lack of water.

She felt fine.

_How?_

Approaching the hedge again, she pressed her finger against a thorn. It hurt, but when she drew her hand away, no blood beaded upon her skin. She drove her arm into the hedge, eyes filling with tears as the thorns dragged and gouged deep into her flesh. With a cry, she yanked it free. Her arm shook as she held it up. The sleeve of her sweater was ruined, but her arm remained unhurt.

_How?_

It had felt real.

_And wrong._

Her options were limited: stay in the maze’s center or find a way out. The former option offered nothing but the status quo. The latter contained nothing but possibility. Maybe Harry and Ron were in the maze, too. Maybe she could find them.

Hermione resumed her jog, the hope of reunion driving her forward. She chose her path without thought, letting instinct guide her, stopping at each intersection to mark her way with a pile of stripped leaves. Periodically, she yelled for Harry and Ron, her voice echoing like a rock thrown into an empty well.

After running for 15 minutes

_30?  
45?  
She isn’t winded.  
She can run forever in here.  
Run where?  
Toward…  
Or away?_

something responded. A voice fainter than her own, pitched low and drawn long, a guttural moan that sent panic spiking through her.

“Harry! Ron!” She practically sobbed their names and held her breath with effort, waiting for their reply.

A whisper of sound from the right fork. She tore leaves from the hedge and sprinted down the path.

_Where are they?_

Like an interfering thought, the question came, a mantra repeated to the rhythm of her footfalls.

  
_Where are they?  
Where are they?  
Where are they?_

The voice didn’t sound like her own, and the question was odd. Hermione didn’t know where they were. She was running to find them.

Unless they weren’t in here.

And if they weren’t in the maze, then they weren’t in Malfoy Manor. And if they weren’t in Malfoy Manor, then they could be anywhere.

The Burrow, in the rural area just outside of Ottery St. Catchpole. The Order of the Phoenix’s headquarters at 12 Grimmauld Place in London. Hogwarts, taking refuge in the Room of Requirement on the seventh floor, across from the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. Back to the Forest of Dean or Godric’s Hollow, though those seemed unlikely.

A gust of wind exploded through the stillness. Hermione missed a step, caught herself against a hedge, and winced against the gale. _Nothing_ barreled toward her. A black wall she could not see past.

She turned to sprint. Her feet slipped against the textureless grass. A scream lodged in her throat.

_This is how she dies._

The blackness enveloped her, and she was nothing.

* * *

The cell floor was hard beneath her thinning hips and cold against her forearm.

Hermione’s head pounded with a migraine, the pain like twin knives behind her eyes, stabbing deep into her skull. She tasted iron and pulled her hand away from her nose to find it sticky with dried blood. A nosebleed?

She closed her eyes and drifted, letting the memories float back instead of digging for them. An endless labyrinth beneath a strange sky. Running barefoot, though her shoes had since been returned. Searching for people, yelling their names.

_Who are they?_

Men. She felt sure of that.

_Lovers?_

That answer was less clear.

Whoever they were, they had been important. Their absence left significant gaps in her memories. They were blurred shapes against Hogwarts’ varied vistas and missing seats along a trestle table populated with red-headed people who gave her the feeling of family.

 _Weasley_.

Yes, she knew that name. But the pain in her head intensified when she reached for more. The information lingered just beyond the sphere of her retrieval.

That was okay she

_Lied._

knew.

They would return to her in time.

And then there was the question.

_Where are they?_

Or had it been a compulsion? Hermione had felt an undeniable need to provide an answer, just like she had in class: hand raised, perched on the edge of her seat, ready with more detail than was strictly required.

She had answered it. She remembered the feeling—the warm satisfaction of _knowing_ —more than she remembered the answer itself. She’d been correct, of course. Top marks.

But at what cost?

Hermione hugged her knees close as tears dripped from her eyes.

She wasn’t a person who forgot things. Knowledge had always been instant for her, the neural pathways that connected the information and formed patterns of association strong from frequent use. It was integral to her personality, foundational to her identity.

_It makes her extraordinary._

She’d always known.

Now, maybe she didn’t.

_And if she doesn’t,  
Then who is she?_

She didn’t know.

* * *

After an uneasy sleep, Hermione decided that the hedge maze had been a dream. There was no other option. She couldn’t have left her cell; she would have woken if they had tried to move her. It was the cleanest explanation. The safest.

Anything else would have crushed her.

_Crushed her, like that blackness, that  
Soul-sucking  
Light-eating  
Life-ending  
Block of nothing  
Rushing toward her like a windstorm  
Sending her spinning  
From a verdant neverwhere  
To a grey somewhere  
A reverse Dorothy Gale._

* * *

Keeping time was an impossible task. Unchanging darkness played hell with Circadian rhythms, and Hermione’s captors had taken her watch sometime after knocking her out, sometime before throwing her into the cell.

Imprisonment wasn’t necessarily torture, but solitary confinement was.

_Limit the things that define humanity  
—food, water, choice—  
to create a prisoner._

It was part of the recipe. A brew, like in Potions class. A set of ingredients combined in the proper order that yielded an expected result.

An inevitable result.

_Deny those things entirely  
to create a ghost._

* * *

Three sleeps after the labyrinth, a heel of bread and a canteen of water fell through the bars at the top of Hermione’s cell door. The noise startled her, sending her shrinking back into the corner.

Her hunger had dulled to a constant ache, food such a foregone conclusion that her stomach no longer bothered to growl. All of her biological systems had been set to minimal function, survival mode. Once she realized that the noise was not a threat, she’d lunged for it, scrabbling at the floor with greedy, grime-coated hands. Her fingers were thin, her nails chipped so badly that she barely recognized them as her own.

They were a fleeting horror, however, when compared to the promise of sustenance. The bread was stale, as hard as the stone beneath her knees. Hermione held it to her tongue to let it dissolve. She was dehydrated but still enzymatic enough to break down the sugars and gluten. It was probably for the best: any faster than a nibble, and she would have puked it all back up again.

At least they wanted her to survive. They wouldn’t have fed her otherwise, and even helpings as meager as a chunk of bread were better than nothing. It kept her alive, but weak. A pliable and willing prisoner, desperate for whatever scraps her captor might offer.

Of course that was their plan. Days spent starving in darkness had stripped her bare. Now, with a crust of bread and a few swallows of brackish water, she felt gratitude. Indebted to a faceless stranger for providing what were her rights as a human being.

Cold logic soothed the surge of raw emotion. The same ruthlessness that drove her captors lingered inside of her, after all. An acquiescence to the dead parts of her that, under normal circumstances, divorced her from emotion long enough to be objective and, under abnormal ones, drove her to dark considerations, like keeping a reporter in a jar for months.

She pressed the bread against her lips, took a sip of water, and told herself the truth.

If the roles were reversed—if Hermione had to break someone to gain an advantage—she would do the same thing.

* * *

The labyrinth had changed. One quadrant was gone, erased from existence like an errant pencil mark. The pile of leaves still sat in the path’s center, but everything beyond it was the same dark navy as the sky. The expanse was borderless, horizonless, stretching into infinity.

Hermione’s stomach churned. She eased herself to her knees and then onto her belly, lying at the edge. Though it made her want to puke, she leaned her head over.

The maze was unmoored. A thin layer of homogenous soil provided just enough substrate to support the grass. Beneath that was more navy nothing.

What if she leapt into it?

What if she took a running start and launched herself into oblivion with open arms and an adventurous spirit? It would be an escape, wouldn’t it? A path out, or through, or whatever direction this was because, as with time, space didn’t seem to hold much sway here.

Her stomach curled at the idea. She couldn’t.

_Not yet._

Not when there might still be a chance.

She rose and crossed to the opposite path, positioned at three o’clock. She stripped a handful of leaves, dropped them, and began to jog.

With the rhythm of her footfalls came a request.

_Names.  
Names.  
Names.  
Names.  
Names._

Which ones? The two from before—the men, the lovers, the gaps in her memory—had never resolved. But there were others. Names she knew as well as her own. People she missed, who missed her, too. Their names came unbidden, a list fleshed with detail. Whatever she knew about them. Whatever made them memorable.

Members of the Orders of the Phoenix.

Hogwarts students who had joined Dumbledore’s Army.

Strangers whose names were all she had. Spies and surefire rebels, Ministry personnel and overseas allies.

All probable fighters

_Traitors._

in the upcoming war, where they would need everyone they could get to win.

An explosion of wind. Of sound. Rushing toward her, a maw of sucking black.

She didn’t bother running; half of her had suspected this ending. Still, the experiment had required repetition to verify the results. Now, at least, she knew.

Hermione closed her eyes, and another piece of her disappeared into the void.

* * *

She wanted her mother.

She wanted a cool, dry hand to rest upon her fevered brow and a kind voice to whisper promises of comfort and an end to the hurt.

She wanted

_Lies._

her father.

She wanted a refuge, a steady shoulder, and a sure path forward. A reminder that she was strong and had accomplished so much already, so she could surely do more.

Hermione reached for their names, their faces, and returned empty.

_She should have jumped._

* * *

Hermione’s body decayed, its withering more obvious every day. She felt it in the sharp jut of her hip bones against the stone as she sat and slept. In the ache of her atrophied muscles as she attempted to stretch. In the creak-click of her knees as she paced her cell, and in her elbows as she pressed against the wall in a pathetic attempt at exercise.

A rattle sounded deep in her chest. It hadn’t been there before. What was happening to her lungs, down here in the damp? Stress played hell on the human immune system. Was it pneumonia? Bacterial or fungal?

A bitter irony. Germ theory, she remembered.

Her family, she did not.

How did she remember the ingredients to Pepper-Up Potion, countless obscure charms, and the steps required to transfigure a porcupine into a side table, but not the name of her primary school or the shape of her favorite stuffed animal?

Time stretched before her, an unending road with no details, while the path behind disappeared piece by piece.

What would be left of her, when

_If…_

all of this ended?

Who would she be?

Would she even know?

* * *

Hermione stared up at the flat navy sky, exhausted. Not physically—that was a horror reserved for her grey stone cell. But the mental exhaustion she felt in the labyrinth was worse. While two points did not make a pattern, they did form a line. She entered the maze a seventeen year old girl with friends,

_She thinks._

parents,

_Presumably._

and, twice now, had left it absent those things. An obedient rat, she’d attempted to run the gauntlet, but had earned no prize for her attempts.

_Why?_

This place wasn’t real, but its consequences were. Repeating the pattern was pointless.

_Why?  
Why?_

It would only lead to more loss. She needed to come out of this with some of her _self_ intact. If she were to help find the Horcruxes…

_Why why why why…_

Hermione sat bolt upright.

Those were not her thoughts.

 _Why_ was not her question.

The howling began, the wall of darkness speeding toward her down the twelve o’clock path. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted toward the blank edge of the maze. The darkness loomed behind her. She ignored her terror and launched herself from the cliff.

A swan dive into nothing, open-armed and ready for the end.

* * *

Hermione woke in a stranger’s cell. Matted straw, stone walls, and no idea why she was there.

“Hello?” Her voice was a peep, small with terror.

Her head… She’d never felt pain like this. She pushed herself to a seat and backed herself into a corner.

Where was she?

Where was she _supposed_ to be?

Hermione wore a stranger’s body. She had no memory of thighs this thin, of wrists so bony and feeble. Hunger was more familiar, but not like this. Never so deep, never so gnawing.

“Help me…” Tears dripped down her cheeks, and she stared at the bars atop her door. “Please. Please, help me.”

She leaned her head against the stone wall, mercifully cool against her temple, and repeated her plea until she drifted into unconsciousness.

* * *

She sat in a field before the entrance to a hedge maze. She didn’t understand. What did this mean? What did they want?

_Tell me._

What?

_Everything._

Her chin quivered. She dropped her face into her hands to sob.

She didn’t know. She didn’t know _everything_. She barely knew _anything_. Everything she’d been

_She had to have been something._

was gone.

There was only one thing left. One piece of information that hadn’t yet been taken.

Her identity.

Her name was Hermione Granger, and she was a witch.

The howling began, a familiar sound though she’d never heard it before. A wall of black loomed large. It didn’t scare her like it should have. She watched it approach, waited with a deadened curiosity.

What did it matter?

_It doesn’t._

What could it hurt?

_Nothing.  
Because that’s what she is._

Nothing.

* * *

Bellatrix Lestrange opened her eyes. Her fingers slid across dirty skin, through hair as matted and snarled as her own.

“Is it done?”

Her eyes flicked to _his_. Red, slitted, and spellbinding.

“Yes.” She lingered on the word, drawing it into sibilance. “She has given us everything, and now she is gone.”

Bellatrix straightened as the Dark Lord approached. His long, sharp-nailed fingers dragged across the scarred wooden table, its veneer gouged and stained to irreparability.

“We owe her a debt.”

Bellatrix’s eyes widened. “My Lord?”

“She has given us _everything_.” Bellatrix flinched, dropping her eyes as he flung her words back at her. “The Order’s safehouses, their members, and their plan to destroy me. Because of this extraordinary girl, we have won the war.”

He ran a nail down the Mudblood’s pale cheek, and Bellatrix bit her tongue. Unthinkable, that the Dark Lord would sully himself with her skin. That Bellatrix herself was still not worthy of such familiarity. She looked down at the Granger girl’s body, trying to see what he saw.

The girl was dead-eyed and slack-jawed. Drool overflowed from one corner of her chapped lips, cutting a shiny track down her cheek and neck. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breath. Granger was alive biologically, but deceased in every way that mattered. Stripped away in three weeks by Bellatrix’s unique blend of Legilimency and Obliviation.

“You are sure she is gone?”

Bellatrix nodded. Like a vulture upon a carcass, she had taken everything worth having.

Hermione Granger was a corpse with a beating heart.

“How shall we reward her, my Lord?”

The Dark Lord’s hand drifted from the girl’s chin to her chest. He pressed a palm to her breast and closed his eyes to better feel her pulse.

“As we shall reward all of her kind who submit before my will.” The Dark Lord opened his eyes. He drew his wand and laid it across her throat like a blade. “With a swift and final oblivion.”

**The End**


End file.
